Adamant is the story of Jeffrey Salazar, a war-hero whose research in alien psychology was vital to the winning of a war with an alien race colloquially referred to as the "Knockers". He visits the Armada flagship, the Adamant, to interview the enemy general who was taken captive. During this interview however Jeff realizes that everything he thought he knew about the Knockers was wrong and shortly after this the humans are betrayed by a "friendly" group of aliens who gifted the humans with "sidejack" technology, a kind of neural-communication tool. As part of the betrayal the sidejack is turned off, crippling the Armada's command structure. Jeff, who lacks a sidejack is able to escape with the Adamant and the rest of the story is him fighting a war against the "nice" aliens by trying to elicit advice from the captive Knocker general. Meanwhile the general is trying to escape.[citation needed]

Adamant, previously titled "The Lurker", originated as a novel co-written with Ethan Skarstedt, one of Brandon's friends who is in the military. They had previously worked together on the short story Heuristic Algorithm and Reasoning Response Engine. The project temporarily died after Skarstedt completed a novel-length draft. Joshua Bilmes expressed the feeling that it was not currently marketable and at the time Brandon did not have the time to work on it. Some time later Brandon was interested in re-starting work on the project; however, Skarstedt was going to be unavailable as a result of being deployed overseas. Brandon then purchased the draft Skarstedt had completed as a "work-for-hire" intending to do a do a re-write.[2] He completed a novella, renaming it Adamant, and plans to work on revisions between drafts of Oathbringer.[1]

While Brandon initially wrote the novella in an alternate-Earth-setting, he is considering reworking the setting so that it takes place in the cosmere.[citation needed]

Currently planned as a sequence of six novellas, four being written by Brandon and the others being written by guest authors. As of December 2016 Brandon had only completed the first novella but had recently had a breakthrough on the visuals and worlbuilding. He wanted to wait until he had written each of his novellas before finding co-authors.[3]